Sweet childish days, that were as long, As twenty days are now *

All this feels so charmingly unreal and away from life's slashing. A vehicle of eight people - five adults, three children - swerves lightly and nonchalantly down a dipping valley and along a mussel-spotted and railway-tuned coastline. Several miles later, the vehicle arrives at a gatehouse, through which it continues along a mile of sun-dappledness, at the end of which is the unreal image of a holidaying family with whom the artist shared moments of her childhood. (It is standing there waiting like a very loyal and necessarily dated toy-chest.) Furthermore, each child in this visited island of memory - that is to say, the children of the artist's childhood friends - has been the subject of a portrait by the artist. One by one, in other words, they have all featured as works in progress on our wall. (I have watched their renditions grow.) So when we stand like New England pilgrims on the sun-licked pebbles where the freshwater river meets the sea - we are 20-odd-strong by now - there is something conceptual, something so unreal, taking place. Small portraits have come to life. Two-dimensionalisms have found that third dimension. And on top of it all, perched like that final parcel of unreality, are breathing and speaking and laughing versions of themselves. I watch the artist during all this. She is flashing kind glances, recalling childhood performances, registering time's slow gnawing of skin, and thinking up those images required upstream. I smile at her and step out of this gentle memorialisation. By the house is a large garden and in that garden are apples. The apples are cooking apples. As I hold my son to one of the trees, he holds one of the apples in his hand. Suddenly it comes away. He looks at it, tries to put it back, realises it can't. Now that is real.
*From 'To A Butterfly' by William Wordsworth (1770-1850)